Open a 7z file
Get the files out of a 7z archive without installing 7-Zip. The archive is never stored.
- Never stored
- No queue, no waiting
- No signup, no watermark
How it works
Add your 7z
Drop it in. LZMA and LZMA2, which is what almost every 7z uses, are both read.
Look inside
Every file is listed with its size and folder.
Take what you want
Download one file, or all of them together as a ZIP.
A format that can hold almost anything
7z is less a compression method than a framework for compression methods. An entry can be stored with LZMA, LZMA2, bzip2, PPMd, Deflate or nothing at all, and filters can be layered underneath — BCJ, which rewrites the jump addresses in executable code so they compress better, or a delta filter for uncompressed audio. LZMA and LZMA2 open here, and between them they account for almost everything 7-Zip produces at its default settings. PPMd — chosen occasionally for text and XML, where it genuinely wins — and BCJ2 do not, and an archive using one lists correctly and then declines to extract, naming what it found rather than failing vaguely.
Solid compression is the reason 7z is small and the reason it is heavy to open. Rather than compressing each file separately, a solid archive squeezes them as one continuous stream, so repetition between files is exploited — a folder of fifty similar source files or config documents compresses dramatically better than a ZIP of the same folder. The cost is that reaching any one file means decompressing everything before it, so there is no cheap way to pull a single item out of the middle of a large solid archive.
That makes 7z the format most likely to exhaust memory here, and it is worth understanding why. A 200 MB archive of text or source code can legitimately hold several gigabytes, because LZMA at high settings routinely achieves ratios that ZIP cannot approach. The archive size tells you very little about what it takes to open, which is the opposite of the intuition most people have. The safety checks refuse an archive whose declared contents are implausible rather than letting the tab die trying.
Encrypted archives cannot be opened — and 7z encryption is worth a word, because it is unusually good. It uses AES-256 with a key derived through a deliberately slow function, and it can encrypt the file names as well as the contents, which ZIP cannot. An encrypted 7z with header encryption shows nothing at all about itself, which is a real security property and also why nothing here can list it.
When you want something else
7-Zip is free, open source, and reads and writes every codec, filter and encryption mode the format allows — including the ones here cannot. On macOS and Linux it ships as p7zip and 7zz, and 7z x archive.7z is the whole command. For any archive that is encrypted, split across volumes, self-extracting, or using PPMd or BCJ2, it is not a preference but the only answer.
For a large archive, a desktop tool wins on more than compatibility: it extracts straight to disk rather than holding anything in memory, so size stops mattering entirely, and it restores the Unix permissions and symbolic links that a download cannot. This page is for looking inside something quickly, or for getting one file out on a machine where you cannot install anything.
Frequently asked questions
Do I need 7-Zip installed?
No. The reader is part of this page.
Is my archive stored anywhere?
No. Nothing is stored and nothing is kept, and it keeps working with the Wi-Fi switched off once the page has loaded. That matters more for archives than for most files — a zip of your tax returns or a backup of a folder is exactly the kind of thing that should not be handed to a stranger's server.
Can you make a 7z as well?
Not yet. Reading a 7z and writing one are very different amounts of work, and the reference implementation is licensed under the LGPL, which this site cannot use. Reading is possible because libarchive implemented the format independently under a permissive licence. For making an archive, ZIP is the safer choice anyway: it opens on every computer with nothing installed, which a 7z does not.
Which 7z features work?
LZMA, LZMA2, BZip2, Deflate and PPMd compression, folders, and archives split across the usual solid blocks. Encrypted archives are listed but cannot be read without their password, which is not yet supported.
Is there a size limit?
Available memory, rather than a fixed size cap. Very large archives are opened a file at a time where the format allows it, so a big ZIP lists instantly and only the file you ask for is unpacked.
Is it safe to open a 7z from someone I do not know?
Archives are the one kind of file whose CONTENTS can be hostile, so two old attacks are handled before you see anything. A file inside an archive can be named "../../something" to try to escape the folder it is unpacked into — those names are clamped and you are told which ones were changed. And an archive can be a few kilobytes that unpacks to terabytes, which would take the browser tab down with it; that is measured and refused rather than attempted.
Good to know: LZMA and LZMA2 archives open, which covers almost everything 7-Zip produces. Encrypted archives and the rarer codecs (PPMd, BCJ2) do not. 7z compresses hard, so a small archive can expand to far more than its size — memory is the limit, not the file.
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